Why the Second World War Never Ended for Ukraine

Juliane Fuerst is a Senior Lecturer in Modern European History at the University of Bristol.

Envelope issued by Ukraine in 2007 honoring the 65th anniversary of the Young Guard

The
Ukrainian crisis exists on two levels. One crisis takes place daily
and in the contemporary world. Its alter ego unfolds in the years of
the Second World War or the Great Fatherland War, as it is known in
the former Soviet Union. While Sloviansk and Mariupol in Eastern
Ukraine are burning, the Ukrainian nationalist Stepan Bandera is
fighting a multisided, violent and deadly struggle against Soviets,
Germans and Jews in the west of the country. While Odessa is marred
by violence between supporters of a ‘new Russia’ and forces
defending Ukraine’s unity, Ukraine’s Jewish population disappears
in an unprecedented act of genocide, orchestrated by the German
occupants, but facilitated by many local forces. While Russia
proclaims itself anti-fascist, Ukrainians are fighting for
independence – then, now and probably tomorrow. History and
politics mingle in a mishmash of memory, emotions and foreboding.
Almost seventy years after its end the Second World War has shown
that its consequences are far from digested and mastered. On the
contrary: they still define a great deal of the identity of people in
this region and nowhere more so than along its cultural and
linguistic fault lines. It is not the Cold War that is rearing its
head in the region. It is the Second World War and its multiple
crimes.

While
Bandera is these days a household name to those following the
Ukrainian crisis, the wartime experience and heroes of Eastern
Ukraine are much more of a mystery. That is in many ways surprising,
because Eastern Ukraine is home to the most famous of all Soviet
wartime heroes: the group Molodaia Gvardiia or Young Guard. Several
generations of young Eastern Europeans and Russians grew up with the
heroes of the Young Guard, since the tragic tale was not only turned
into a bestselling novel but an extremely popular film. The story of
the Young Guard has had a long afterlife, which underscores the fact
that in this part of the world the wounds of the Second World War
have not healed and continue to fester. A closer look at these
Eastern Ukrainian heroes tells us a lot about Eastern Ukraine, its
unexplored wartime history, commemorative universe, and the ambiguous
relationship between Russia and Ukraine, past and present.

At first
glance the Young Guard is the exact opposite of Stepan Bandera and
his Ukrainian nationalists, sharing only the futility of resistance
and a tragic end. The Young Guard was a self-proclaimed underground
organization of the Komsomol, the Soviet youth organization. It was
formed and was active in two villages in the Krasnodon region and
consisted of local youth, whose families were in the majority miners
and clerks. While explicitly referring to its Komsomol status, it
seems that the creation of the organization happened spontaneously
and by the initiative of a few resourceful youngsters, who only established contact with the official Soviet underground
network post-factum. (This fact was to become very contentious and important in
the following years.)

The young people were busy creating clandestine
cells and sabotaging occupation efforts to send people for work to
Germany. Their masterpiece was to burn down the labor exchange set
up by the Germans and run by Ukrainian collaborators. Early in 1943
the organization was uncovered and more than seventy young people
were hanged or thrown alive into one of the deserted mine shafts.
This occurred only days before the Red Army re-conquered the area.
One of the Red Army commanders, who witnessed the recovery of the
corpses from the shaft, was Nikita Krushchev, already an influential
member of the party nomenklatura. He wired the heroic tale of
resistance and sacrifice to Moscow and one of the Soviet Union’s
most eminent writers, Alexander Fadeev, was dispatched to draft the
story for public consumption. Almost instantaneously, his book became
a bible among Soviet youth, who loved both the comradery and devotion
of the main protagonists and its general story line of heroic
resistance against the brutal, German invader. The heroes not only
defended their fatherland but also helped rescue the world from the
evil of fascism. This is the narrative that still informs Russia’s
and Eastern Ukraine’s narrative of the war.

The
Young Guard is testimony to the extent that Soviet socialization was
successful among youth in the mining communities of eastern Ukraine –
the Young Guard dutifully couched its activities in oaths of loyalty
to the Soviet system and stressed its compliance with Soviet
ideology. The emphasis here is on Soviet. In both film and novel the
fact that the action takes place in Soviet Ukraine is portrayed as
only ornamental to proceedings. Fadeev made the Young Guard a story
of Sovietness, not any regional particuliarity. The heroes’
nationality was irrelevant at that moment in time (and indeed they,
like the Donbass as a whole, were multi-ethnic, counting Russians,
Ukrainians, Jews, Armenians and Uzbeks among their ranks), as it was
to be for another fifty years, especially since Ukrainian ethnicity
(as defined in the Soviet passport), unlike for instance Jewish
ethnicity, was no hindrance to success in the Soviet Union.

Only when
the Soviet superstructure fell away in 1991 did the question of
nationhood arrive in this part of the now-deposed Soviet Union. That
was even truer, since the Donbass, both as geographical and
discursive unit, reinforced Sovietness. After all the Donbass was one
of the most prestigious regions of the Soviet Union, where the leap
from backwardness to an economically advanced future was achieved
through intense mining of the local black coal. The Donbass was
couched as one of the motors of Soviet industrialization –
personified by another Soviet hero, Aleksandr Stakhanov, who in a
single workshift delivered 102 tons of coal in less than six hours,
and kick-started the so-called Stakhanovite movement. Of course, his
feat had been carefully prepared and staged by the local party
bosses, who in turn were acting on orders from Moscow.

And here
is where the complications with the Young Guard in particular, and
for Eastern Ukraine in general begin, because reality is always a bit
more complicated than propaganda. Just like Stakhanov, who much to
the embarrassment of Soviet authorities could not handle his fame and
drank himself to death, the Young Guard turned out to be more
multifaceted than a heroic tale of Soviet resistance against German
fascism. Fadeev had travelled in haste to the Krasnodon region in
order to research the Young Guard. He had to find lodgings there and
was offered a space with Elena Koshevaia, who claimed to be the
mother of the leader of Young Guard, Oleg Koshevoi. Fadeev dutifully
made Koshevoi his main protagonist in his book, which he wrote as
semi-fiction, but which was marketed as historical fact.

When the
book appeared it met with universal approval – except in
Pervomaiskoe in the Krasnodon region, where the events had taken
place. It turned out that Koshevoi had by no means been the
undisputed leader of the Young Guard. Indeed, the person Fadeev had
earmarked as the traitor, Sergei Tretiakevich, an older lad, was
rumored to have been the true organizer. His past was not as squeaky
clean as Oleg’s. Sergei had returned to the village shortly after
the German invasion as the only survivor of a partisan unit. There
were rumors that he had betrayed his comrades or left in cowardice.
Yet he was also the only one in the village at that point with some
underground experience. As often is the case, those closest to the
action were also those most prone to have a checkered past. In the
postwar years, Tretiakevich’s family fought long and hard to
rehabilitate him, not least because his stigma as one of the
potential traitors haunted their livelihoods for years. What one did
during the war and even where one was during the war made and broke
careers in the post-Soviet Union. Just having lived under occupation
left a mark on one’s record.

Other
families of Young Guard members were also not happy with the
portrayal of their children. And here too one can discern an
important moment that is of relevance to today’s crisis. There
were complaints that some mothers, who were more educated, had
advocated for greater attention in Fadeev’s book to their dead
children. Local families fared less well than those who had recently
arrived from Russia. The Donbass’s relationship with Moscow had
never been one of simple allegiance, but rather one in which a local,
self-confident region often felt patronized by Moscow.

Because the
Donbass was a prestige project, interference from the center was high
and not always welcomed. Many locals resented the fact-finding
mission from Moscow that arrived in the wake of the death of the
Young Guard members. They felt that a local story with local heroes
was instrumentalized for the use of the center to the detriment of
the Donbass. This feeling intensified when Stalin ordered a complete
rewrite of the novel in 1948 to include the leading role of the
communist party in the story. The villagers felt that the story was
taken from their youngsters and given to the party committee in
Lugansk, which was acting on orders from Moscow. While later
fact-finding missions agreed that the propaganda version – and
especially the post-1948 version – was not grounded in historical
reality, there was never an attempt to look at the Young Guard as
history. Mythology was more important to the Soviet regime than
historical accuracy, which might have unearthed shades of grey, which
would only have muddled the picture, rather than the black and white,
which the party demanded.

Yet
silence and myths hardly bring closure. One of the most interesting
figures of the Young Guard was Valia Borts, probably the most senior
surviving member of the organization. When it became clear that its
secrecy had been compromised, she fled, crossing the frontline and
uniting with the advancing Soviet army. She should have been the
primary witness to events, but was strangely sidelined, even though
she does appear in Fadeev’s novel. Her silence is double: when she
supported the Tretiakevich family’s attempt to clear the name of
their son, she was reprimanded by the Komsomol Central Committee,
which reminded her of the many privileges she had received. She then
became one of the most vocal defenders of the official version. Maybe
even more important, she never uttered a word about her Jewishness
and the particular danger she faced under German occupation.

The
murder of the Jewish population does not appear in either the book or
film about the Young Guard. Indeed the Holocaust simply does not
figure in official commemoration of the war, even now. According to
Soviet history, Jews did not suffer as a particular group under
fascism. The Holocaust was not recognized as a separate crime from
the other crimes perpetrated by the invaders. It took until 1956,
when the poet Evgenii Evtushenko broke the silence with his poem Babi
Yar, which was about the massacre of the Jewish population in Kiev
under German occupation. The pogrom that Kiev’s Jews suffered after
liberation by the hands of local Kievans was a well-guarded secret
until the opening of the archives in 1991. Borts’s silence is
emblematic of the fate of the Ukrainian Jews even now. They are pawns
in the propaganda battle to claim moral superiority, but their
suffering is ignored. The pamphlets that recently appeared in Donetsk
telling Jews to register with the authorities may have been a
provocation to discredit the separatists or they may have been
genuine. Whatever the case, they showed a shocking lack of
compassion for a people who were almost entirely eradicated in a
conflict that now defines Ukrainian identity in East and West.

In other
respects too, the whole region continues to commemorate a sanitized
version of the war. The multifaceted story of the Young Guard, with
its multiethnic membership of Ukrainians, Russians, Jews and
Armenians fighting both the Germans and local collaborators, was
pressed into a two-dimensional story of Soviet youth versus fascist
invader. The naming of one or two traitors from within covered up the
controversial status the organization enjoyed during its existence,
when much of the local population feared reprisal for the reckless
acts committed by the young resisters. While interrogation, torture
and death in book and film are committed by the hands of the Germans,
archival documents and eyewitnesses testify to the fact that it was
local Ukrainian (and this reads here as local Eastern Ukrainian)
collaborators, who executed the German orders to liquidate the group.
One of them was sentenced to death in a trial immediately after the
war, yet the implications of this fact were hushed up. It also
quickly transpired that Oleg Koshevoi’s mother had herself hosted
Germans and supposedly been friendly with them. It is unlikely she
had them voluntarily in her house. But was she friendly with them
because it was expedient or because she had to cover the activities
of her son? Was she a cynical operator in or a terrified victim of
the German occupation?

Such questions, which only surfaced relatively
late even with regard to Western European collaborators, were never
asked in the Soviet context. Yet it precisely these questions which
have the potential to unite rather than divide the memory of the war
in East and West. It is the gray of history that is ubiquitous in all
war areas, not the black and white of propaganda. It is disheartening
to see how the same mistakes are repeated even now in much of the
press, creating new myths of simplistic righteousness and judgment.

In Soviet
discourse, traitor status went mainly to the Western Ukrainians (and
other unfortunate nations who found themselves deported already in
the middle of the war). This not only negated the existence of
collaboration, for whatever reason, in all occupied areas, but also
the active Red Army service of many members of the condemned
ethnicities. Female war service as well as grassroot resistance
without party guidance was also shepherded out of official memory.

From the 1970s onwards this simplified version of the war became the
subject of a serious cult. The cult of the Great Fatherland War kept
the war alive. It makes up an integral part of people’s identity in
this part of the world even now. At best the cult served as a
reminder how the world was saved from fascism. At worst it was a
straightjacket preventing any kind of confrontation with a violent,
problematic and contentious past. The war became entrenched in the
heads of Ukrainians in east and west –narrative versus counter
narrative with nothing in between. Unsurprisingly, as independence
arrived, rather than their commonality, Ukrainians found their
differences when thinking about the war.

Acknowledgement of imperfect
pasts on both sides of Ukraine might generate a bit more
understanding for the complexity of individual motivations at the
time, which gave so little choice or such impossible choices to so
many people in Europe. And it might give Ukraine a shared rather than
divided past – a past on which a nation can be built rather than
destroyed.